Night Slashers (Arcade)

It's like killing monsters... Actually it's just killing monsters.

Data East has a history of hit and miss gaming. This one is more of a "skewed off to the side" kind of game. In the same vein as Final Fight, Mutation Nation, Violent Storm and other such brawlers, Night Slashers takes a sort of Van Helsing approach to gaming and pits three characters (The Heavy, All Rounder and Nimble Minx) against a medly of monsters from various franchises and source materials and you get to beat them up in a variety of fashions and ways.

How's it "uncanny" if he knows lots of martial arts?

You've your strong character, a mix of cybernetics and cheesy rock with a dash of California in there. Capable of picking up monsters and leaping around while using combos and attacks others can't. Your all rounder character that looks very synonymous to Van Hellsing while having a balance of combos and moves and then there's the token bonus nimble character that nobody really wants to pick as they can't take a hit as well as the others and has more moves than most people will bother to try and learn to be effective with them before having to select another character as they've just lost their last life... again. Night Slashers knows its cliches and falls into the same trap as almost every other similar game (Undercover Cops... Monster Maulers... Dynamite Cop 2... I'll stop there...)

...maybe

INTROOO!!! Actual fighting is not as fun/easy.

Plot wise for Night Slashers, you get various monsters roaming the world and these 3 people are going to fix it. By killing everyone and not looking for a cure. Zombies are roaming the streets, Doctors have gone mad, Frankenstein's Monster is stalking in the shadows, a pastiche of Dracula causes trouble, someone gets to punch out a helicopter, a Mummy fights using wrestling moves (not bad for an emaciated guy...girl...dead person), all because some demon is returning to this plane of existence and your characters need to kill it. (No spoils but if you've seen certain episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, you know what to expect. Yeah that episode with the possessed book that got scanned into a scanner...)

Give it now! Cut this 'running away' shit and get to the fighting!

Graphically, Night Slashers is certainly riding high in the blood, guts and gore department. Everything you fight and kill dies (un-dies?) in a violent or gruesome fashion while cut-scene images look impressive and reek of 90s comic book stylings which adds to the cheesiness of the game but not in a negative manner. Likewise, getting critical hits on enemies throws up a comic book style effect to illustrate that you just hit harder than you ever hit before and often resulting in an instant kill with standard enemies. The largest problem, graphically speaking, is that the animations of the creatures and the characters becomes less fluid depending upon which movements the characters are forced to go through, usually getting up or moving more dynamically beyond the point of the generic "menacing walk" down the street.

At least he has an idea of what to do

Having said that, the audio in Night Slashers tries its hardest to give the player an experience with the music that ultimately falls flat in places but ambles along amicably enough to set a suitable mood without the emphasis on being too serious while not being overly slapstick (the graphics and Over The Top violence do that already), and while it's impressive to hear digitised speech and sound samples for the combat, it's rather repetitive to hear the characters repeating the same words over and over, ad nauseam, every time they get up or do a special move. The first few times it's ok, after that it simply becomes dull and monotonous.

Obligatory lift level

There's little here to come back to for Night Slashers, after the first time the game is beaten, aside perhaps to see the excessive violence and cheesy horror setting and in all regards, even that isn't enough to determine more credits from pockets. Repetitive gameplay despite the option for more attacks and combos and an awkward control system coupled with monsters and bosses that get stupidly high levels of priority in attacks, bury any chance of a real replay interest with the very undead it has with its own monsters.

Don't care, kicked your arse already.

Beast Busters - Arcade

Some beasts need busting, take 3 machine guns.

SNK have a name for themselves in making some of the tougher games out there. In particular, and namely so, the SNK boss syndrome where the last boss (or every boss if you're unlucky) is nightmarishly difficulty, has higher priority over all your attacks and does moves you could never hope to do. However, this is a light gun game they've made called Beast Busters and it's... following the same suit that SNKs bosses do.

Sounds like a nice vacation spot.

Beast Busters is a tough game, there's no two ways about that. Despite it catering for up to 3 players at once, each with their own excessively meaty looking sub-machinegun, it's a nightmare to play and unless you really are watching carefully, you'll end up shooting things you don't need to shoot and getting shot by the things you do need to shoot.

Bedlam, carnage, guns, zombies. I love it.

However, jumping ahead of myself here, Beast Busters takes the idea that a town has suddenly become a ghost town and rather than send in the authorities, it's decided that 3 gun-ho pricks will meander in and take a gander at the situation. Shit goes down, stuff blows up and everything becomes chaos and hell within the first level. Though to be honest, as soon as the first person you met was BLUE and SHOOTING AT YOU, I'd have turned around and walked off if I was still walking at that point. Though that wouldn't make for much of a game.

Should that not be "recently found" ?

Our 3 "heroes" are now stuck deep in enemy territory while trying to figure out what happened, how to escape and basically machinegun, grenade, rocket, flame and electrify everything they can to escape. You get a set of magazines of ammo and have to kill a specifically reoccurring enemy in each level for more to drop in for you to shoot to claim. Most enemies in this game aren't dead however, until they explode, so if they go down, they may get back up and keep attacking. Invariably, this means nearly every enemy must be killed twice.

Most mid-bosses have a pattern and weak point.

The enemies within Beast Busters are a colourful lot at best and not because they're blue skinned. There's some really gruesome looking enemies and monsters, ranging from diseased dogs, to giant birds/eagles/owls (I don't know), mutated piranha, giant head-neck turd bosses (help me please) and even flesh-monster-car creatures that puke rockets at you. Creativity is not in short supply in this game. The problem is that you're likely to run out of credits a long way before you get to see most of the more interesting enemies and bosses.

This is why you should always scrap your car, yourself.

Audio, there's little really to have for music as it's drowned out for the noise of screams and slaughtered monsters and enemies. However the sound effects are loud proud and quite overbearing but you'll manage always to know when you're nearly did thanks to the klaxon sounding "Warning: Now you are about to die" signal. Incidentally you WILL hear that noise a LOT and then "YOU ARE DEAD" being broadcast loudly proudly and spoken to you too as if one method just wasn't enough to hammer home that point where in you died.

Who the fuck writes this?

Even with 3 people playing Beast Busters and unless you're perfectly in psychic synchronisation, you will find yourself heavily overwhelmed within the first few levels and the pressure doesn't let up in the slightest after that. The most annoying part is that the plot maintains that going along the river will be safer and then you're looking at the most enemies and most simultaneously attacking groups you've ever come across within the game, so much for the "easier" route. (Though why it's level 4 at that point and easier was pretty much asking for things to get a lot harder).

Lightning grenades, in case explosions weren't enough.

If you manage to find a means of playing Beast Busters effectively, you're in for a fun ride of highly imaginative enemies and settings, interesting use of transitions between one part of the level and another and a gore fest almost unparallel for the time. But it's still going to be a difficult slog through some of the toughest gun-game sections seen barring Mechanised Attack (Also by SNK...) and with little replay value, brought down by the difficulty, you'll likely play this once or twice and skip it beyond that.

Splatterhouse 3

Splatterhouse 3: Fairlight, no idea why it's called Fairlight

The third in the trilogy and quite a step in a different direction, Splatterhouse 3 takes the original 2 games and adds a pseudo third dimension to the gameplay. Gone are the 2D platform sections of the previous 2 games and instead what we have is a room-based brawler taking the Terror-Mask laden, Rick and most of the enemies that he's fought in the previous games and making something quite unique. 

Reads better than "Rick, filled with piss, goes to find the toilet"

Even going so far as to add a developing story and plot, where in Rick, the Mask and other supporting characters are subtitled in conversing and discussing the dangers and solutions required (Punch it... repeatedly, you learned this for 2 whole games so just get down to the PUNCHING!) including multiple story paths depending on successes and failures.

Clock's ticking, work it out and save the day.

It's fresh, it's new, it's breathing something different into the mix, but that's not always what the fans want and sometimes isn't what's required for a series. I could point at various games going into full 3D platforming then dropping back into 2D games with 3D graphics. While Splatterhouse 3 isn't quite akin to that level of change, it is still change and it becomes the task to determine whether or not that change is for the better.

Overall it is. So much for setting up that pseudo essay.

The giant bore worm, looking like a walking dick with teeth... this probably came from someone's nightmares.

But what exactly are we dealing with here. What we have is a fairly well-paced game that mixes up the dynamics of games like Streets of Rage, Golden Axe and others of their kin and uses the setting and graphics style of the original Splatterhouse games. Which really is a better thing to do with the Megadrive (Genesis) as was shown with Splatterhouse 2 in that the change down in graphics didn't help the game despite keeping with the original style of play.

That's the problem with fighting the supernatural, rules don't need to be followed.

This is significantly different and not just in being able to move into the background. You have a standard attack which can combo into various others and finishing with an uppercut, you have your jumping kick which lets you cross the ground fairly quickly but does little impact and knocks enemies down, which gives them a while to get back up again. You have an all-round attack that throws lots of enemies away but is more a case of backing enemies off rather than being powerful (depending upon your location of the game, an odd one here in that in some regions of the world, it's a POWERHOUSE of a move but needs a bigger keypress combo to use).

Lift off!

All this is augmented by the soul orbs which when used, can allow Rick to transform into Super Sayjin... I mean a more powerful mask wearing, hulking abomination of muscle and fused mask that hits harder and can powerbomb enemies. But it wears off after a room or runs out of soul power. So it's generally kept for bosses that need to be taken down quickly. These soul orbs are fairly plentiful and usually on the final stretch towards the boss room.

"Hinding" ? Did nobody spellcheck this game? At least it's not "Makes a shandwich"

Yes I said room. The game is set within another mansion though this time the evil has "invaded" (The fuck? How's that work exactly? Nevermind, it's what 'evil' does) the house and converted it into the old West Mansion from within. After each battle within a room/corridor, you can pull up a map when you pause the game and see the layout of the area. This mainly helps because there are some doors that open one way (You can't tell which from the map other than it's one way but not WHICH way) and some teleport you around the floor. But your main reason for using the map is that the game is timed.

"I'm trying to eat your wife, can't you come back later?"

From the off, you have a time limit in which to get to the boss and kill it otherwise you incur a bad ending. Depending on how many times you fail, depends upon how bad the ending is. From escaping the house and banishing all evil and killing the mask, to your wife dead, turned into a monster and your son sacrificed and the Evil One (great name guys, so creative) ruling the earth until you kill him (Which you will do anyway). If you take the right route and manage it quickly enough, you'll be given bonus levels to attempt which are filled with tough enemies but lots of health, soul and lives.

There are few weapons in the game, they negate blocking but if you drop them, these heads steal them and only one room per floor as them and where they take your items. They're not that great anyway.

The enemies, are largely taken from other games in the series with a few of them being rather original, or slightly modified to fit in with the new game. Some of the attacks are obvious as to when they'll be used and you can often sidestep or jump out of the way. Other attacks are instant and the further into the game you get, the harder hitting they'll be. Brand new enemies will be a nightmare at first as they'll have high health and you'll be entirely unaware of their attacks. Thankfully (and rather disappointingly) the AI of the enemies and most bosses is fairly similar and one attack method will often work for almost anything the game designates to you as a target.

2 bosses, at once, and this is a standard room later in the game.

Graphically, the enemies and characters are smaller than the previous two games but at the same time the detail is a lot higher and lot more focused on backgrounds as well as the enemies, particularly the bosses. Every enemy and boss has multiple stages of damage where they'll attack while in one phase and look "healthy" (for a dead monster with no hands and no head) and after taking enough damage, will look damaged or will change their appearance. In bosses and most later enemies in later levels, this will bring about new attacks.

"BLOOD DICK ASSAULT!" No I made that up. But this is your all-round attack.

Oddly for a brawler, while bosses tend to come back later in the game as a "big" standard enemy. Splatterhouse 3 uses the first boss in the 3rd room of the second level. Barely enough time to worry about the new map before you're fighting 2 of the same boss at the SAME TIME and without much of the soul orbs. I've not seen this with any other boss however.

This boss was in the 2nd game and was about 50ft tall. We have a slight difference here.

The soundtrack for the game is very impressive and was clearly composed with the levels in mind and the urgency of the plot. Later levels have faster beats, harder music that instils more adrenaline and fits better with the increasing difficulty while also still sounding like music that fits within a horror film set within a haunted house.

The deer-heads make a welcome return as one of those homages. They don't puke though.

There's little in the game that comes across as negative but what little there is, is quite damning. The controls of the character, particularly when moving, if not carefully managed can leave Rick wandering uselessly around by himself through the house and the timing of combos has to be spot on if you want to prevent the enemies from attacking through your attacks. The distance needed to his many enemies is slightly more than they need to hit you and it takes far too long to recover from the floor whenever floored by an attack. This could be intentional on the game's part to slow your progress and make the timer more of a worry, but a shorter timer and shorter recovery time would negate this impact.

Some corridors/halls have smaller enemies that gradually drain health, faster to walk down but impossible to be unscathed by the assault.

It's the game that should have been Splatterhouse 2. It's not perfect but serves as a good step between the arcade original and the remake game of 2010.